After picking Electric Fence as my second power, choices for sex, height and girth were made available. I chose a 4' (the smallest whereas 8' is the tallest) not-so-muscular female as my avatar. Now at this point, I was already quite pleased having already decided where I was going to go with my character. The wealth of visual detail available in the costume creation process was an incredible shock to my system and immediately sent me into fits of glee...

The Head: You can change the hair style, whether there's a half helmet, full helmet, no helmet, hood, no hood, half-mask, full-mask, no-mask, glasses or not, beard or not (if you're a male), face types, and more details that are harder to describe inside all of those seperate options including antennas, horns, breathers, and glowing eyes.

Upper Body: Pick between types of wear including tights, loose fitting clothes, armor, suits, as well as shoulder armor, belt, and gloves. Each of these have different major shapes as well as types, such as leather, metal, or other more exotic choices, along with texture overlays to give them patterns for a more distinct look. There are also a ton of chest emblems which can be chosen to symbolize powers or names.

Lower Body: Here you can choose between types of wear the same as the Upper Body. Depending on the type of wear you can choose to modify the upper and lower pants differently with all of the same options available. Many different boot styles and modifications are also available for use.

Colors: Each of the pieces of costume that you choose for your hero can be modified in color, many of them having both primary and secondary colors. There are enough colors here to make your hero thoroughly individual without too much effort.

The result of all of these modifications was one badass supergal that looks like she's been shocked one too many times with hair that stands up, eyes that glow, circuitry in her supersuit, robotic gloves, and thick metal boots to conduct the voltage.

Being satisfied with my shockingly (laugh along kiddies) good hero costume, I was dumped into creating my character's ID card, which works as your character bio in the game. It was here that I chose the name 9-Volt, gave her a battle cry and could have given her a bio, which I will eventually when I feel more creative. Once done with that, the choice was given to move to a tutorial zone or jump into the actual game. Seeing as I'm a newbie, the tutorial sounded good.

The Birth of Justice

Even Superman had to learn to use his powers before he started conquering super-villains so I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that I needed some lowly cops to show me the ropes. In any case, this quick, compact, action-filled, and informative tutorial does exactly what Cryptic was hoping it would do. It keeps them interested while teaching them everything they need to know to survive the early portions of the game.

Contacts: The first lesson presented is how to deal with contacts in and around the city. These are the NPCs that give you missions and information about other contacts... who can give you more missions and contacts. These are important characters and you'll begin collecting a library of them. As you complete missions for them, the option opens up to call them from the field. These are important people for you to know.

Hospital: Every time you die when on a mission, you'll be transported back to the hospital for recovery. Of course, you could either use an item or wait for a friend to revive you, but chances are at the beginning of the game you'll be making some trips to the infirmary. If that happens, you'll incur experience debt. You'll still make experience in your fights, but some of it will move towards making up the debt, which is indicated by a darker portion of the bar.

Combat: Where many MMO's have players initiate an attack and then sit back and watch the action, City of Heroes takes a bit more of a active approach. Attacks are still calculated with "dice rolls", but instead of simply sitting back and watching the action unfold, each separate attack, whether a simple punch or powerful lightning attack, has to be initiated by the player. Each attack also has a recharge rate and energy cost. The good thing about combat is that even in early levels, you'll have a good number of attacks on your list, which can be used either with the number keys or by clicking on the button in the hot bar at the bottom right of the screen.